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Ever since built the first industrial lab in 1900, research and development has been a highly secretive affair. Security protocols have been regarded almost as important as scientific ones. Industrial espionage has often been pursued as zealously as the political variety.

More recently, , arguably the world’s most innovative company, has become renowned for keeping its cards close to the vest and even “don’t be evil” has launched its own super-secret research center.

However, amidst the cloak and dagger a new open innovation trend has begun to take hold. The turning point was Henry Chesbrough’s 2003 book, Open Innovation, which coined the term and laid down basic principles. Since then the idea has gained steam and it's becoming clear that open innovation initiatives are key to staying competitive. Here’s how to make it work.

1. Making Breakthroughs When You're Are Stuck

In Thomas Kuhn’s breakthrough 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he noted that normally science moves forward under fairly strict paradigms based on what is known at the time. Eventually though, things run their course and science becomes stuck until a paradigm shift (a term Kuhn coined) enables a new wave of advancement.

Businesses who seek to innovate run into the same problem. They tend to work in silos, hiring engineers to work on engineering problems, chemists to work on chemistry problems and so on. That works well enough most of the time, but much like Kuhn’s scientists, after a certain point they get stuck on a particular problem and find it difficult to advance.

That’s when open innovation can be really helpful because it allows you to synthesize knowledge across domains. Platforms like Innocentive allow you to expose thorny problems to a more diverse skill set. Often, an unusual issue for chemists is a typical problem in a different field (like, physics for example.

2. Don’t Build A Brand, Build A Platform

When launched Kinect for the Xbox in 2010, it quickly became the hottest consumer device ever, selling 8 million units in just the first two months. Even better, being the first company to launch a gesture interface helped rejuvenate the company’s image in the tech world. Microsoft became cool again (well... almost).

The device attracted a lot of attention and not just from consumers. Almost as soon as it was launched, hackers started fiddling with it, altering its capabilities to do things that Microsoft never intended. Historically, Microsoft could have been expected to get their lawyers cranking out cease and desist orders.

But they didn’t. In fact, they embraced the hackers, altering the USB cable to allow for more developmental flexibility and releasing a software development kit (SDK) in order to help them along. This was a surprising shift from what we had come to expect.

And Microsoft is not alone. Everywhere you look, brands have become less corporate assets to be leveraged and more platforms for innovation. What would the iPhone be without apps? Or Facebook for that matter? Or YouTube without private channels. These days, it’s not so much what you can create as much as it’s what you can co-create.

And you can see why. For an organization of any scale, providing young companies with seed money is pocket change. Microsoft offers start-ups $20,000 dollars, probably less than they spend on coffee. The NY Times simply offers office space.

Meanwhile, they get the most dedicated employees in the world: entrepreneurs chasing their own dreams. If things go well, the small initial investment is likely to be augmented by venture capitalists who are willing to fund new ideas that are likely to fail in the hopes that a few home runs will make it all worth it.

For particularly promising ideas, firms can acquire not only the company, but the talent as well. It’s an incredibly efficient way to innovate.

4. Test and Learn Programs

For a long time, marketing was a fairly sleepy affair. You had big agencies who would negotiate with big TV stations and deliver big campaigns. A lot of thought would go into strategy and tactics, but very little into emerging media channels.

Technology has changed all that. These days, new platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest can emerge at lightning speed and that presents a problem. If you jump at every new opportunity, you won’t have time to do much else and will lose focus , but if you wait for nascent technologies to reach scale, your competitors will run circles around you.

Many marketers are adapting by running ongoing test and learn programs where 5-10 pilot programs are run each year. Most prove to be ineffective, but the low risk (usually less than 1% of the marketing budget is dedicated to the program) and high reward makes it worthwhile.